Tuesday, August 16, 2011

xkcd 936 - the discussion continues

WOW. That was my immediate thought (We use wow in Norwegian as well) when I saw xkcd 936. WOW. That is pretty close to exactly what I've been trying to tell people for the last 10+ years, while researching passwords. Hat off, kudos and whatnot to Randall Munroe for this one! Now for some of the discussions in the wake of 936....

"Our findings were that the NIST model of password entropy does not match up with real world password usage or password cracking attacks."

Now, I could poke Matt with saying that their analysis were done towards revealed passwords in the form of leaks from sites like Rockyou etc. Having cracked almost nothing else than passwords from Microsoft Windows systems of real corporations and organisations for 10+ years, I think I've got evidence enough to say that "my" passwords are better in almost any measurement compared to the Rockyou, Hotmail lists and more. (Matt; what about applying your metrics to my data? ;-))

2. Never Trust Password MetersThis link will take you to an earlier blog post from me, and then back to the first one, based on an infographic that Mikko Hypponen made a tweet about. I hope and believe those 2 blog posts will widen your horizon in regard to password meters, password entropy and more.

Although difficult sometimes, we should remember the difference between protecting our personal accounts, and (personal) accounts at corporations and organisations where a security breach can have a much wider impact than that of your own privacy.

4. Mixing it all
Mikko Hypponen really do impress me. Never met him, but his information, in any channel, is precise, short and informative. He also does a terrific job with his tweets, including all the retweets from others. And suddenly today, he retweeted this image from @ly_gs. Right back at the entropy calculations :-)

Melvin; We have 29 characters in our Norwegian alphabet, make your infographic with various charsets and/or languages applied. :-)

Phadej posted this feedback:We actually need more words, as entropy of the words is less than characters. Suppose there is about 50000 words (There is 301 000 main entries in OED). Than 50000^x > 94^13 => x => 5.5So i would say that "balloons are very nice" < "@$XsBv2JMc473"Also entropy of word like "are" is almost zero, so predictable. And xkcd strip actually kind of takes this into account. I will stick with pronounceable/memorizable passwords like pwgen kindly generates for me.

WolframAlpha says there are 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. Lets take a shot at WolframAlpha: 600000^4 (4 simple words) = 129600000000000000000000 combinations. No offence, but I REALLY think we should drop this blind entropy discussion for measuring password strength.

Davienthemoose tweeted "until you use a dictionary set for cracking by word to break passphrases. Then each word becomes a char of 1".

Nice idea. After the CrackMeIfYouCan competition at this years Defcon, somebody said something like "we are now actually able to crack '4 simple word passphrases' (Can't remember exactly who, where and when, sorry!). Sure we/they can! On the other hand; being able to so is closer to blind luck, IMHO. Why? Well, back to the entropy, corporate password policies and just plain common language.

We've said password for decades, and we've tried to convert people to use 'passphrases' instead. Is widelyorderprivateestablished a good passphrase? Not in my opinion. Maybe the sentence "I live in New York, USA." (without the quotes)could be better? At least it should be easy to remember for quite a few people over there.

No, do NOT look at the contents of the password and say "Duh! DORK!". You have absolutely no idea what the password is before you actually crack it. See "Please crack my password" below.

Davienthemoose: Nice idea, and you should talk to some of the hardcore John the Ripper (JtR) guys to learn more. From my point of view: we're right back at the entropy stuff again, SP800-63, and much more. Please go back to Matt Weirs paper. :-)

I'll leave it for the evening right here, it's 23:47 and I've got to sleep. again. Just this last one, just for the fun of it:

5. Please Crack My Password
Please crack my NTLM hash: DD1E31A5C1709A9CF54893B89E24CA09
It is 4 words, and it complies with probably most (reasonable) common corporate password policies. It is very personally related to me, making it easy to remember. Good luck, you've got 14 days.I'll donate some money to freerainbowtables.com or any other password related open-source project of your liking through PayPal, if you can crack my ... password/phrase/sentence above. I'd really appreciate an explanation on how you did it, and of course you can mock me for a LONG time afterwards.